The CEO's Guide to Generating Revenue from New Product Introductions

Joining us for today’s show is Amir Wain, a Chief Executive Officer who knows how to commercialize technical innovation. This show suggests ways to generate revenue from new product introductions. Amir and I answered questions from the new How to Your Number in 2018 Workbook to demonstrate generating revenue from product introductions by leveraging emerging best practices.

Joining us today is Amir Wain, the CEO and of i2c, a payment technology company. I2c provides the infrastructure to enable companies to address the needs of the next generation of payments and commerce with personalized payment solutions. Watch as Amir demonstrates how to commercialize technical innovation.

In today’s show, we begin by discussing by determining which problems that are worth solving through product development. Customers have many problems, but you can't solve everything. Amir explains how to select the problems that matter to go after. Amir explains:

Every month people from customer success, compliance, engineering, service delivery, and customer service come prepared with a sequential list of items that they want the company to spend resources on in terms of product development. Each advocate their case as to why their suggestion is important, and the others get to question and challenge. Together they determine where the resources must be deployed for that month. The monthly cycle is important, because if your assessment was wrong, then you can quickly adjust and correct course.

Amir’s description relies on agility to provide the courage and the capability to pivot to the next thing and keeping these cycles down to monthly sprints to keep product development pointed in the right direction. We then discuss how to fit your product to a growing market and how to do that at scale.

Watch as Amir advises how to develop a strong product to market fit, as he begins to explain:

I think one thing to keep in mind is to distinguish between invention and innovation. A lot of times engineering and product teams get into the invention business, and it's cool that I've come up with this really. That's good. But can I monetize that? Can I commercialize it? That's the innovation piece.

Skip to the 9-minute mark of the video to for Amir to describe the difference of invention and innovation. It’s great advice on how to stress test whether a buyer is going to write a check for it or not, and that's the ultimate proof of product market fit.

We discuss in detail how to think through the market plan and select the right routes to market. Amir begins with this quote:

The innovation adoption curve and the model of early adopters shows how people who would buy or not buy, no matter how good the product is, and what all it can mean to them unless they have validation and customer references. Depending on where you are in your product life cycle, I think recognizing it and making sure you keep adjusting and making changes to support, that is important. People who you would initially go after may not be a good fit for you later in the cycle, so the whole organization realizing that, and being prepared across your company is extremely important.

Watch Amir describe the product life cycle and how to think about where the product is in its life cycle. Using that as an input, determine which products to sell, to which customers and through which channel.

A fascinating discussion involves how to validate value propositions for your product, and how competitive positioning fits. Amir and I discuss how to validate whether or not differentiation is real or false. From there, you have a superior product, and have the opportunity to receive a price premium.